BATMAN[/size]
Part 1[/size]
Alter Ego: Bruce Wayne, Various cover identities ("Matches" Malone, Sir Hemmingford Grey, etc.)
Occupation: Multimillionaire Industrialist, Playboy, Philanthropist and Crime Fighter
Marital Status: Single
Known Relatives: Thomas Wayne (father; deceased); Martha Wayne (mother; deceased), Philip Wayne (uncle), Jack Wayne (grandfather), Laura Elizabeth Wayne (great-grandmother)
Group Affiliations: Justice League of America (current); Justice League International (formerly); Outsiders (former leader)
Base of Operations: Gotham City
Height: 6'2"
Weight: 210 lbs.
Eyes: Blue
Hair: Black
First Appearance: Detective Comics #27 (May 1939)
BATMAN: Modern Age [/size] (Post Crisis)
Born c.1953. (Adjusted to c.1962 by Zero Hour)
Started career c. 1978. (Adjusted to c.1984 by Zero Hour)
First comic book published in 1986.
Bruce Wayne had a short but very protected childhood. Born to the wealthy parents Thomas and Martha Wayne, Bruce grew up knowing the ideal life only experienced by few boys. The only son of the very wealthy industrialist Dr. Thomas Wayne and his socialite wife Martha, young Bruce was insulated from the harsher troubles of the world as he played on the grounds of stately Wayne Manor outside the rat race of Gotham City.
Thomas taught Bruce that a man's greatest asset was his intellect. That brute strength and violence were no match for reason and self-discipline. He tried to instill the old values of duty and respect for the law into Bruce's young mind.
Martha set an example of compassion for Bruce as she devoted time and energy to charitable causes. She helped him to understand the nobility of aiding those who were weak and helpless rather than exploiting them.
Having little contact with other children, Bruce found a friend and constant companion in Alfred Pennyworth, the Wayne major domo... The Wayne’s had hired Alfred because his extensive education made him qualified to act as a sort of tutor to young Bruce, while his military training in combat medicine meant that he'd be the perfect person to have around should some accident befall their precious son.
While playing on the grounds, young Bruce fell into a cave opening. Inside the cave were very large bats, who'd might as well have been demons or monsters for the effect they had on the child.
The sheer terror of this brief incident would leave an indelible mark on Bruce's mind, although he would seem to forget the event shortly afterwards.
When Bruce was around seven years old, the Wayne’s took him on a rare excursion into the city. The old theater in Gotham's Park Row neighborhood was playing the Mark of Zorro, which Bruce wanted to see. Although Thomas wished his son would idolize a more intellectual hero like Sherlock Holmes, he indulged the boy this once. Park Row had once been a socially elite neighborhood, and that's how Thomas and Martha tended to think of it despite the gradual decline it had been undergoing recently. So noone gave it a second thought when Thomas took his little family for a short walk after the movie.
As the Waynes passed Chryme Alley (originally named after a family, a clerical error would later designate it as "Crime Alley", which would become the popular name for the entire neighborhood), a man with frightened, hollow eyes and a voice like broken glass being crushed would accost them. In his robbery attempt Joe Chill would shoot both of Bruce's parents to death. Bruce Wayne saw his parents gunned down in Crime Alley in front of his eyes, an event which scarred him for life.
Although the mugger's bullets didn't touch Bruce, they killed him as surely as they destroyed his universe. Violence had destroyed Reason. Brute force had destroyed Compassion. All sense left Bruce's life. All that remained was rage. A need to avenge his parents' murder... To make the mugger pay.
Following their death, Bruce made an oath to devote his life to the elimination of crime and evil in all its many forms. Vowing to protect the innocent and bring killers and other criminals to justice. Some small part of Bruce found a reason to go on living in that. To avenge the victims of crime... To make all criminals pay... To put things right. An utterly impossible task, but one to which Bruce dedicated his existence.
At age 14 he embarked on his global sojourn, attending courses at Cambridge, the Sorbonne and other European universities. Beyond academia, Bruce acquired more practical skills. Frenchman
Henri Ducard made him an apprentice in man hunting. The ninja
Kirigi schooled Bruce in stealth and the ways of the shadow warrior. African Bushmen taught hunting techniques, while Nepalese monks revealed healing arts.
As he grew up, Bruce studied and practiced anything and everything he thought might serve him in his task. He mastered various forms of martial arts as though possessed by a demon. He traveled the world to train under the greatest fighters, hunters, detectives, and even magicians he could find. His lack of attention to formal classroom studies gave Bruce's regular teachers the impression that he was lazy and not very bright... His frequent disappearances to pursue his personal training goals lead people to assume that the teen-age Bruce was off on hormone-driven misadventures. Bruce learned to use this to his advantage, allowing people to think he was AWOL from boarding school to chase a little redhead in Paris or a blonde in Barcelona, when in fact he would be participating in a judo tournament in Japan under an assumed identity or learning to control his heart rate in a Buddhist monastery in India.
So it went for 12 years as Bruce matured into manhood, eventually returning to Gotham City, place of his birth. Bruce returned to Gotham to begin his fight. But he knew something was missing. He needed something to bring all his training and special weapons together... But he didn't have the patience to wait for it. Dressed in a nondescript disguise, Bruce went on a "recon" mission, just to see how bad Gotham had become.
The city had degenerated into a veritable cesspool, with most of the police force on the take, and the city officials in the pockets of organized crime. On the street level, criminal scum hunted anyone weaker than themselves like sharks hunting guppies. It wasn't long before Bruce found himself stupidly getting involved with a pimp who was manhandling a child prostitute. In no time Bruce was in the middle of a street brawl with the pimp and his stable of hookers, which ended with a gunshot from a trigger-happy cop. Bruce barely made it home alive. In his shock-induced delirium, Bruce mocked himself for "putting the fear of God" into the criminals... Then he realized that fear was the key. He had to find a way to make the criminals terrified of him from the first glance. Home, in the study that had been Thomas Wayne's, within easy reach of the bell that would summon Alfred, who could stop the bleeding before it was too late, Bruce resolved that he would die if the answer didn't come to him then and there.
As a toddler, Bruce had fallen into the bat infested limestone caves beneath Wayne Manor. As an orphan child those same bats haunted his nightmares with the rush of leathery wings. Only in adulthood would Bruce embrace the bat as inspiration.
Without warning it came. The same image that had struck him dumb with terror so many years before. The unearthly, flying predator of night. The bat. He would become a bat! After years of study and training, the
Batman was born.
Here he began to work for the better of the city, both by setting up the charitable Wayne Foundation, and as a costumed vigilante, Batman, who inspired fear in criminals and respect, eventually friendship, in police captain James Gordon.
After recovering from the gunshot, Bruce began his career as Batman in earnest. Starting with the street scum, he worked his way up to the upper echelons of the criminal world. Along the way he ruined many bad cops, finally including the corrupt Police Commissioner.
In addition to Alfred, Batman had other important help in his crusade. Assistant District Attorney Harvey Dent was his original "inside man". Police detective Lt. James Gordon was originally in charge of hunting down the Batman, but instead developed a working relationship with the Dark Knight by the time he became Captain. Later, as Commissioner, Gordon would grant the Batman "special officer" status.